GOP leaders remove 4 from plum House committees

AP foreign, Tuesday December 4 2012

KEVIN FREKING

Associated Press= WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker John Boehner's decision to take plum committee assignments away from four Republican lawmakers after they bucked party leaders on key votes isn't going over well with conservative advocacy groups.

Reps. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas and Justin Amash of Michigan will lose their seats on the House Budget Committee chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan next year. And Reps. Walter Jones of North Carolina and David Schweikert of Arizona are losing their seats on the House Financial Services Committee.

Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, said Tuesday that the party's steering committee made the decision "based on a range of factors."

All four had voted against the agreement in the summer of 2011 to raise the government's debt ceiling, and three of them opposed the budget blueprint Ryan wrote.